Reading through some essays on utopia and dystopia in the latest issue of Bookforum has been very enlightening and kinda mind-blowing at the same time. Paul La Farge put forth the idea that the idea of a utopia is very similar to a videogame and has a great quote: "Games interrupt life, but they do not suspend it indefinitely, nor is it within their power to supplant it." Even the most psychotic WOW player has to eat sometime and make money to give them their leisure time, or else live with their parents. And I had never heard of "The Situationists", a bizarre cultish collection of French avant-gardists who wanted to design a city based on moods and sensations.
But so far, the essay that has stuck in my mind is one by Keith Gessen on dystopia. What it really becomes is a meditation on why with our world the way it is, which is completely fucked up, more dystopian novels are not being written. He argues that it is because we no longer need to dream about a dystopian world. We already live in one. We just need to walk out the door. Or thanks to the internet, we no longer even need to do that. One symptom of that dystopia is that we can now read each other's minds, what with all the Facebooking, Twittering, Tumblring, etc. I had never heard of the famous to everybody but not to me "Fuck you, you 5' 6" shrimpy piece of shit" postings on Tumblr. It's almost like every day of entries on these social networking sites has the potential to become a Shakespearean novel or Chekhovian short story.
Gessen begins to meander into the author's nightmare of the death of the book. Back in the day you had books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 where books were either destroyed or outlawed by government authority figures. Instead, in the real world, economic factors and the free market have destroyed them. You could say the same thing about newspapers and magazines. The internet is the true reflection of our society. Anarchy under a delusional mask of law.
Gessen states that :
"The end of the book does not come wearing a uniform; it comes when the people of the book, who spent so much time warning us about the police, themselves turn into the police, writing cease and desist letters or bursting into bloggers' homes to protect their "intellectual property"-- when they're not sending the same blogger's merchandise, hoping for a good review."
This reminded me a bit of the snivellings of the Japanese manga creator Yana Toboso, when she said she was going to starve and die if pirates continued to access her work without forking over their money. Like she's not rich. Please. Reminded me a bit of that old televangelist, wasn't it Oral Roberts, who said he had to raise a couple million dollars or God was going to call him up. In the end we all die. Ms. Toboso, do you think that Black Butler is really going to matter in 100 years? I used to do Lady Murasaki's hair. You are not Lady Murasaki. Your books will pass away in time, whether you starve or no. Like the book publishers are not interested in ripping us off.
I hope that all literature is destroyed. There's very little of consequence being produced in our age anyway. The last truly great novels were written in the 1930s. Poetry died in the 19th century. Plays died even earlier. I think in 1000 years, poetry will be the big thing. Our writers suck so bad that Twitter and Facebook have filled in the gaps. Fucking Walt Whitman would have been all over our shit, writing poems about the internet, singing about cellphones. But we live in an age where Inception is like a message from God to his slightly retarded offspring, humanity. We seek the mysteries of life as imagined by an off-kilter podunk.
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